St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Gary, Indiana. Photo: Indiana Historical Bureau/Facebook

[Episcopal News Service] St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Gary is Indiana’s only historically Black Episcopal church. Since its founding as a colored mission nearly 100 years ago, the congregation, mirroring the city, has experienced growth and decline.

“When I was a child, midnight Mass on Christmas was standing room only, and all the politicians, including Mayor [Richard G.] Hatcher (Gary’s first Black mayor who served from 1968 to 1988) and different congressmen and councilmen came regularly. …St. Augustine’s was quite a church in its heyday.” Phil Johnson, a former parishioner of St. Augustine’s who now lives in nearby Chicago, Illinois, told ENS. 

Paula M. DeBois, a lifelong member of St. Augustine’s who now serves as the parish’s historian, has worked to preserve the church’s building and history. Over the last five years, she worked with Indiana Landmarks and the Indiana Historical Society to get the church approved by the Indiana Historical Bureau for a state historical marker. Their efforts were successful. In August, volunteers from Decay Devils, a local landmarks restoration nonprofit, installed the marker in in front of the church between two large oak trees, where it’s visible from the street.

Former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, who preached at St. Augustine’s in 2016, congratulated the congregation after the marker was installed in a video message:

“The historic marker [recognizes] the continued existence and faithful witness and ministry of your congregation over these many years,” he said. “One of the wonderful things about having a historic marker is that you never know how many people will stop and pass by and … take note of the fact that you have been there and have been serving and ministering and worshiping God in that community and that sacred place for many years.”

Gary was founded in 1906 by the U.S. Steel Corporation as the home for a new steel plant. The new city was predominantly white and segregated, so 30 Black professionals looking for a church home established St. Augustine’s Episcopal Mission in 1927. The congregation relied on part-time priests until 1938, when then-Northern Indiana Bishop Campbell Gray assigned Benedictine monks of St. Gregory’s Abbey – now based in Three Rivers, Michigan – to assist the congregation. The mission soon began to flourish, and the monks continued serving there until 1946. 

Gary remained predominantly white until the 1950s, when Black Americans emigrated from the South seeking jobs. (The city had the highest Black population per capita, 85%, in the United States between 1970 and 2010.) Many of them joined St. Augustine’s, and the congregation quickly outgrew its rented building.

The vestry then commissioned Edward D. Dart, a mid-century modern architect best known today for designing the Water Tower Place along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, to design a new church building in Gary’s Tolleston neighborhood. The church was dedicated in 1959, two years before St. Augustine’s was elevated to parish status in 1961. The structure, a modern A-frame style with a curved, sloped roof, gives the appearance of hands folded in prayer; it has won two awards by the American Institute of Architects and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013.

Debois told ENS that many people have asked her “repeatedly” if St. Augustine’s started as a white church that became Black due to white flight because “they cannot fathom how a well-known white architect could possibly have worked with Black parishioners.”

The answer, she said, is “no.”

“We’ve always been a Black parish, and we hired Edward Dart to work for us, and he agreed to do it,” she said. “We didn’t inherit this historically significant building from white folks.”

St. Augustine’s building reflects a forward-thinking community whose history is being lost to time, Gretchen Buggeln, a humanities and art history professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana whose scholarly work includes researching American religious architecture, told ENS. 

“If you drove through that part of Gary today, you would have no inkling of what a thriving middle class, professional African American community it was at the time St. Augustine’s was built,” she said. “A lot of that physical history is gone now. Thankfully, St. Augustine’s building is very-well preserved.” 

During this peak in the 1950s and 1960s described by Buggeln, DeBois and Johnson said St. Augustine’s members also were “really instrumental” in helping Gary’s Black community, from finding adoptive families for Black children to advocating to integrate the beach at Marquette Park along Lake Michigan.

“My church has done Christ’s work, and I think that story needs to be shared,” DeBois said. “Whether it was how the church integrated the beach, became the first church in the Diocese of Northern Indiana to install a female priest in the 70s, hosting summer camp for the youth or helping Black babies get adopted – they did it all to celebrate Christ.”

Beginning in the late 1960s, Gary’s population began to decline due to white flight, redlining and U.S. Steel cutting its local workforce. The city’s population dropped from a peak of 180,000 residents in the 1960s to fewer than 70,000 today. The population drop and public school closures – including six high schools – led to St. Augustine’s membership decline.

Today, St. Augustine’s has 25 members, most over 70 years old. After its last rector, the Rev. Davil L. Hyndman, retired in 2018, St. Augustine’s became the latest parish in Lake County to join the Calumet Episcopal Ministry Partnership. The county’s six Episcopal churches share two part-time priests, including a Lutheran priest; St. Augustine’s has a Sunday 11 a.m. service. 

DeBois has been researching ways to regrow St. Augustine’s congregation. For her, revitalizing the church and preserving its history are ways to honor the church’s founders and “devout” congregation.”

“I think St. Augustine’s story is a compelling American story,” she said. “We made a life for ourselves, and that life included a religious life.”

-Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.